RPG Organization in a Post-Paper World
One of the central challenges in writing a core rules book for a roleplaying game lies in striking the balance between teaching document and reference manual. RPG rules aren’t by nature linear. The components of a well-constructed system interrelate in any number of ways. Often it’s tough to judge what to introduce first and what to call out (with page refs) for later explanation. The standard format, which is useful in large part because it’s standard and people are used to it, favors the teaching text. It tends to lay out sections in the order you encounter them while creating your characters. However, character creation takes up only one session per campaign. Assuming the rules are complicated enough to consult during play, you spend much more time with the book as a reference manual than as an introduction to the game. A book organized with that in mind might be arranged quite differently-perhaps with the most-referenced systems first, or in more of a gazetteer format. You don’t see this much, because if the book fails to teach you the game and get you playing, you’re not going to stick around for the reference part.
We may or may not be facing a future in which the tablet-ready PDF document replaces the physical book as the default format for an RPG. But as a thought experiment, let’s say that it will. In that universe, the PDF could come with a button you could hit that would transform its organizational structure, as needed, from initial read to easy-to-access reference document. Another button might hide all of the examples until you need them, in which case you can pop up individual examples as you go. You might also collapse heading levels, opening passages only as you need them.By attaching tags to each rules passage, so you could set it up to display each reference to a creature, culture, rules sub-system, or whatever, all grouped together.